Exploring The Land

A Best Seller Seeks Truth On The Prairie

December 08, 1991|By Tim Madigan, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

DALLAS — To discover bestselling non-fiction in the rural grasslands of the American Midwest, a writer need only look closely. As evidence, consider author William Least Heat-Moon, who took the time-three years-to study a place called Chase County, Kan., and rendered a 600-page tome called ``PrairyErth (a deep map)`` as a result.

This book, which follows by nine years Heat-Moon`s Americana classic

``Blue Highways,`` has made it to No. 7 on The New York Times best-seller list.

All this attention is for a book about a county of 3,000 people that otherwise is mostly grass. It is an irony that Heat-Moon relishes.

``I do like to write against presumed knowledge,`` he said. ``People presume or assume they know all they want to know about Kansas. And I liked the idea of trying to write a book about a place that looked empty and barren.``

Why? Partly for the challenge, he says. There is a trace of literary daredevil in Heat-Moon, a man trusting in his storytelling skills while trying to prove this maxim: In every life, no matter how obscure, there is drama, poignancy-a story. His problem in ``PrairyErth,`` a geologic term for the soils of the central grasslands, wasn`t a dearth of material, but too much.

``I finally had to cut it off because there was no way I could get every tale I heard in,`` he said.

What`s more, Heat-Moon says, his experience in Chase County proves there is a ``PrairyErth`` waiting in every chunk of America, if only people would look.

``What I hope we care about is our own particular terrain. If I can draw somebody into one small piece of the United States, which incidentally happens to be nearly at the heart of America, then I also think they`re going to be drawn into their own lands, their own topography.``

Such is a world view that, like his pen name, derives from the fraction of his ancestry that is Osage Indian. From a young age, Heat-Moon, the son of a Kansas City lawyer, felt a strong attachment to the land, spending more time in wooded areas and along streams in the outskirts of the city than in a classroom.

``When I was a boy of 8, I wanted to walk on every square foot of America. I didn`t realize how absurd that was,`` says Heat-Moon, now 52, who also is known as William Trogdon. ``Since I was little, I had the urge to know this land as no one else has known it.``

Only after painful years as an adult would he set off to pursue that dream in earnest. Having lost his job as a professor at a small women`s college in Missouri because of declining enrollment there, and with his marriage failed, Heat-Moon in 1978 loaded up a van and embarked on a 13,000-mile, three-month journey across the backroads of America.

The result was a national best seller, ``Blue Highways,`` a quirky celebration of the places left behind as a nation moved to the city. It was on the ``Blue Highways`` journey that the idea for his latest work took hold.

``As I would come into these little towns and stay for a day or so, I wondered what would happen if I stayed for a season rather than just a day, but still try to remain an outside traveler,`` Heat-Moon said.

After ``Blue Highways,`` that notion fused with a yen to explore Chase County, a place in Kansas where Heat-Moon once noticed that the backroads seemed to end.

``I liked the clarity of line in a place that seemed to require me to bring something to it and to open to it actively: See far, see little,`` Heat- Moon writes in ``PrairyErth.`` ``I learned a prairie secret: Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.

``The book is very much about the American past,`` Heat-Moon continues.

``We`re famous as a nation for being people who don`t give a damn about our past. As somebody said, `The American disease is forgetfulness.` When you have a forgetful people, you also have a nation capable of losing its way.``

Yet Heat-Moon`s thesis declares also that a nation need not retreat to the grasslands to find itself.

``A whole lot of people are ready to find out that we don`t have to live the way we live,`` he says, ``That this land is an incredible place, and if you`re open to it, your own life begins to take on aspects of the marvelous.``